Media Access and Electoral Support for Public Goods Platforms: Experimental Evidence from Benin

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1 Media Access and Electoral Support for Public Goods Platforms: Experimental Evidence from Benin Leonard Wantchekon and Christel Vermeersch yz January 25, 2009 Abstract This paper empirically investigates the e ects of membership in information and social networks on the demand for public goods. The data originate from a unique eld experiment that took place during the rst round of the 2001 presidential elections in Benin. Randomly selected villages were exposed to purely national public goods or purely redistributive electoral platforms, while the remaining villages were exposed to standard mixed platforms. We nd that overall, voters react negatively to public goods platforms. We nd that individuals who are exposed to media or who are members of local associations are less averse to public goods. Ceteris paribus, demand for public goods is higher among voters who have ethnic ties with a candidate, are more educated or female, but we nd no modifying e ect of religion or socio-economic status. New York University; leonard.wantchekon@nyu.edu y The World Bank; cvermeersch@worldbank.org z The ndings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank Group, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Gregoire Kpekpede. Anjali Thomas provided excellent research assistance. We thank seminar participants at the World Bank, University of California at Berkeley, University of Cape Town and Dartmouth College for valuable comments. 1

2 The role of information and civic engagement in economic performance has attracted a great deal of attention in the recent development debate. The empirical political agency literature has identi ed public access to information as a key determinant of corruption levels and public goods provision in developing countries (See, for example, Reinikka and Svensson (2003), Besley and Burgess (2002)). More recently, Keefer and Vlaicu (2006) explain the predominance of clientelism and low levels of public goods provision by the lack of reliable information on policies and candidates. The goal of this paper is to contribute to this literature by investigating the relationship between membership in information and social networks, and the demand for public goods. By memberships in information and social networks, we mean use of media outlets as sources of information, participation in associative life and political discussions, and connections with the outside world through traveling, language skills and long-distance family relationships. We measure a voter s demand for public goods by assessing how her voting changes when she is exposed to a purely national public goods electoral platform instead of the regular electoral platforms. A major challenge to the estimation of voters reactions to di erent electoral platforms is that electoral platforms are consciously chosen by politicians according to voters characteristics. Even when they follow a particular electoral program, when targeting particular audiences of voters, politicians choose messages they think will appeal to those voters. Hence the di erence between voting patterns among groups of voters is likely to re ect both the electoral platforms used by the politician and the characteristics of the voters. A solution to this endogeneity problem is to randomly expose voters to particular messages and measure their voting response. The data used in this paper originate from a unique eld experiment that took place in the context of the rst round of the March 2001 presidential elections in Benin. Randomly selected villages were exposed to purely redistributive or clientelistic or purely national public goods platforms, while the remaining villages were exposed to the default mixed platforms. The experiment is unique in the sense that it involves real presidential candidates competing in real elections. This avoids the problems of external validity associated with laboratory experiments. We con rm the nding in Wantchekon (2003) that voters do not favor public goods electoral platforms, as re ected in their sanctioning candidates who use them. Wantchekon 1

3 (2003) found that women are less negatively oriented to these platforms than are men. A study by Fafchamps and Gabre-Madhin (2001) argued that women are the driving forces behind regional commerce in Benin, so the question rises whether the association between gender and demand for public goods is an artifact of the social networks and trade contacts that women participate in. For example, women who travel more might value development of roads and other infrastructure beyond the locality as an important policy issue. We nd that individuals who have access to information have a higher demand or lesser aversion for public goods. We nd that voters who are more involved in political discussions are more averse to the public goods platform while those who are members of local associations are less averse. We nd that, while information and membership in organizations might explain a signi cant amount of voter response, they do not drive the di erential responses between men and women, with women still more responsive to public goods platforms. Finally, we nd that certain voter characteristics reduce the aversion to public goods: quite surprisingly ethnic a liates of a candidate respond more positively to a public goods electoral platform. The result also holds for more educated voters. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the impact of information campaigns on the provision of public goods and accountability in governments. Reinikka and Svensson (2003) provide evidence from a policy experiment suggesting that increased public access to information reduced the level of corruption and capture of public funds in Uganda. In another important contribution to the political agency literature, Besley and Burgess (2002) use data from sixteen major Indian states for the period to analyze governments responses to bad economic conditions such as falls in food production and crop ood damage. They nd that responses in the form of public food distribution and calamity relief expenditure is higher wherever newspaper circulation is higher. Strömberg (2004) provides similar results in the US context, using data from the implementation of the New Deal Program in Controlling for a host of relevant economic and demographic variables, he nds that counties with radio listeners received more relief funds. While we do not make causal claims regarding the impact of media access, our results suggest that media outlets not only a ect the nature of the agency relationships between governments and voters, but may also induce voters to have a stronger preference for national public goods. In fact, one may argue that access to media 2

4 a ects accountability partly because it makes voters more public-spirited. The theoretical background of our empirical results are based on Kitschelt and Wilkinson (2006) and more importantly Keefer and Vlaicu (2006). The latter present a model in which politicians in new democracies have credibility problems and can overcome these problems either through repeated interactions or targeted transfers. They show that, in equilibrium, politicians prefer targeted transfers, which leads to a high level of corruption and low level of public goods. An implicit assumption behind this result is that voters prefer targeted transfers when electoral promises are not credible. This implies that any individual characteristic that would increase a voter s trust in candidates would also increase his or her responsiveness to public goods platforms. In this paper, we will focus on access to information, education, membership in organizations and ethnic a liation. We test the following hypotheses: more informed, more educated, more politically active voters would be more responsive to public goods platforms (since they would be more trusting of the candidates). The result would also hold for those who are from the same ethnic group as the candidate. The paper further develops the basic results of the Benin experiment presented in Wantchekon (2003). In contrast to that earlier paper which establishes the positive e ect of clientelist platforms and the negative e ect of public goods platforms as well as the modifying e ect of gender and incumbency, this paper focuses on factors that mitigate the negative e ect of public goods platforms (e.g. information, education, ethnicity). Before we discuss the execution of the experiment and the results, we brie y introduce the context. The Republic of Benin is a former French colony, located in West Africa and became independent in The rst twelve years after independence were characterized by political instability with alternation of civilian and military rule. In 1972, the country experienced its fth and last military coup, which paved the way for a dictatorial regime led by Mathieu Kérékou that lasted for 18 years. In February 1990, mass protests and economic pressure from France led the military regime to convene a national conference (a gathering of representatives from all of the political groups of that time) that gave birth to a new democratic government (Heilbrunn (1993), Nwajiaku (1994)). The new constitution, written by the transitional government and approved by referendum, provided for a multiparty democracy. Since then, Benin has experienced ve parliamentary and four presidential elections. 1 The president is elected through 1 The country s rst presidential election took place in 1991 and was won by Nicéphore Soglo. The country had 3

5 simple majority rule with run-o elections. 2 Benin is considered one of the most successful cases of democratization in Africa. Elections are meaningful and voters policy preferences can be inferred from their behavior at the polls. Moreover, Benin is perceived by many political scientists as the democracy laboratory of Africa because its political elite has the reputation to be open to political experiments. 3 The distribution of votes in presidential elections prior to 2001 was such that there was no risk that a eld experiment would seriously a ect the outcome of the 2001 election. This is because (i) nationwide election outcomes had always revealed a signi cant gap between the top two candidates (Kérékou and Soglo) and the remaining candidates and (ii) electoral support for those top two candidates had always been between 27 and 37%. 4 As a result, a second round election posing Kérékou against Soglo in the 2001 presidential elections was a near certainty. Benin has recorded a remarkable 4.9 percent average annual economic growth over the last 12 years (World Bank estimates). Despite this positive economic outlook, the GDP percapita in 2006 was only USD540 and an estimated 31 percent of the population lived one less than a dollar a day in Data show that only 65 percent of the population has access to an improved water source (2000) and that 30 percent of children below the age of 5 are malnourished (2005). The primary completion rate for 2004 stands at 49 percent. According to a World Bank report (1997), achieving higher levels of economic growth and poverty reduction will require dramatic improvement in the e ectiveness of public service delivery through public expenditure reform, decentralization and reduced corruption. Yet the state payroll consumes between 65 and 90 percent of the government s budget. An estimated 50 percent of public services jobs are pure patronage redistribution and could be suppressed without a decline in the quality of public services (Decalo (1990) and The World Bank (1997)). its second regular presidential contest on 3 March 1996 and Nicéphore Soglo lost to Mathieu Kérékou, the former autocrat. Kérékou won again in March 2001 for what would be his last term in o ce. The latest presidential election took place in That is, if no candidate obtains a majority during the rst round, a second round is organized for the top two candidates on the list and the winner is elected. 3 For instance, the political leaders in Benin were the rst to introduce the rotating presidency formula to curb ethnic strife in This formula was later adopted by leaders of the former Yugoslavia in 1980 following Tito s death. Benin also invented the national conference formula in 1989 as a way of facilitating a peaceful post-authoritarian transition (Boulaga 91993)) 4 In 1991, Soglo obtained 27.2% of the vote, Kerekou % and the next candidate Tevoedjre 14.21%. In 1996, Soglo received 35.69% of the vote, Kerekou 33.94% and Houngbedji 19.71%. 4

6 Table 1: Presidential Candidates and Parties Participating in the Experiment Party Candidate Candidate characteristics Experimental strongholds FARD- Ala a Kerekou National North Incumbent 2 strongholds out of 4 RB Soglo National South Opposition 2 strongholds out of 4 PSD Amoussou Regional South Incumbent 2 strongholds out of 3 UDS La a Regional North Opposition 1 stronghold out of 1 Experimental design and data This paper identi es the e ect of voting platforms on voting behavior using an experiment that exposed randomly selected villages to purely redistributive / clientelistic or purely national public goods platforms, while the remaining villages were exposed to the default mixed platforms. The experiment took place during the rst round of presidential elections in March In these elections, sixteen candidates, representing or endorsed by sixteen parties, took part in the rst round. The research team identi ed the ve most important candidates, and invited four of them to participate in the experiment through the intermediation of their parties. These four candidates were chosen so that there would be two national and two regional candidates, two northern and two southern candidates, and two incumbent and two opposition candidates. The distribution of the candidates who participated in the experiment is presented in Table 1. The main concern in the design of the experiment was to avoid any potential a ect of the experiment on the election result. For this purpose, the experiment was conducted by candidates only in their respective stronghold districts. An electoral district was de ned as a party s stronghold if the party gained at least 70 percent of the votes in each of the previous presidential elections (1991 and 1996). Using this de nition, 21 out of the 24 electoral districts in Benin were classi ed as strongholds of one party, while the others were classi ed as competitive. Once the strongholds were identi ed, two stronghold districts were randomly picked for each of the four parties participating in the experiment. For one candidate, La a, the choice of districts was done slightly di erently. La a did not participate in the previous presidential elections, but he participated in the 1999 legislative election. Based on the results of those elections, it appeared that two electoral districts were highly likely to turn out to be his strongholds, and 5

7 hence these districts were selected to take part in the experiment. However, it turned out that in one of those districts, La a was not the dominant candidate in the 2001 election, but that another candidate dominated. Since the experiment was meant to measure voters response to changes in platforms by the dominant candidate, ex post this district did not qualify to be part of the sample. Table 1 summarizes the distribution of strongholds among the experimental candidates. In each chosen district, two villages were randomly picked to take part in the experiment. If the two villages were less than 20 kilometers apart, the second village was put back into the pool and another village was picked. Then a coin was ipped to decide which one of the two villages would be in the public goods treatment group, and which one would be in the clientelistic treatment group. According to the 2001 census, the population consists of 6,633 registered voters in the redistributive/clientelistic treatment group, 6,983 voters in the public goods treatment group, and approximately 220,000 voters in the control group. For the purpose of the survey used in this paper, one village was randomly picked from the control group to be in the comparison group. More formally, the experiment followed a randomized block design with treatments being assigned randomly to subunits (villages) within a number of randomly chosen units (electoral districts) in the population, which consists of all stronghold districts in Benin that are dominated by the four experimental candidates. Denote by N s the number of electoral districts controlled by candidate s 2 f1; 2; 3; 4g ; where candidate s is an experimental candidate. Then N = P N s is the total number of electoral districts involved in the experiment. Within each electoral district j, there are n j villages. The randomization process consists of the following four steps: Step 1. Candidate s randomly draws 2 districts (say j and k) out of his N s stronghold districts. Step 2. Candidate s randomly draws one village from the n j villages in district j and randomly draws one village from the n k villages in district k: Step 3. Among the n j 1 remaining villages in district j and the n k 1 remaining villages in district k; remove from the pool those the villages that are contiguous or in the immediate vicinity of the village picked in stage 2. Then draw randomly one village from the remaining villages in districts j and k: 6

8 Step 4. Among the two villages in district j that were chosen in steps 2 and 3, ip a coin to decide which one will be assigned to the redistributive treatment, and which one will be assigned to the public goods treatment. The remaining n j 2 villages in district j will serve as a comparison group. Repeat this procedure for district k. The experiment thus involved 14 treatment villages in 7 districts, with the remaining villages in the corresponding districts serving as a comparison group. For the purpose of this paper, the survey also included one control village per district, randomly chosen from the pool of comparison villages. The strength of randomized evaluations rests on their ability to average out unobserved di erences between treatment and comparison groups. In this case, the small sample size poses a potential threat to the validity of this argument. To mitigate this problem, we perform a series of robustness checks on the estimated treatment e ects by adding various control variables and xed e ects to the regressions. In general, the coe cient estimates are strikingly robust to the inclusion of these variables, raising our con dence that the results are not due to an artifact of the small number of randomization units. While the treatment was meant to be as uniform as possible within the redistributive/clientelistic and public goods categories, four di erent parties with various party programs were implementing them. For this reason, the two types of messages were designed in active collaboration between the research team and the campaign managers of the parties, and they were based on the platforms that the parties had adopted independently of the experiment. A public goods message raised issues pertaining to poverty alleviation, public health and education reform, agricultural and industrial development. A distributive policy message, in contrast, took the form of a speci c promise to the village, which could take the form of promised government patronage jobs for locals, local public goods such as establishing a new local university, nancial support for local shermen or cotton producers. By and large, a public goods message and a distributive policy message stressed the same broad issues. However, the public goods message stressed the issue as part of a national programme, while the clientelistic message stressed the issue as a speci c project to transfer government resources to the region or the village. In order to facilitate a clear distinction between the two types of messages and enhance the internal validity of the experiment, a public goods message never promised patronage jobs and a redistributive policy message never promised education reforms or vaccination campaigns. In addition, while 7

9 campaign workers stressed the need for ethnic cooperation and harmony when they delivered the public goods messages, in the clientelistic messages they outlined the ethnic ties of the candidate with the local voters whenever it was possible. 5 For each experimental village, a team of campaign workers was formed by one or two party representatives and a research assistant, who doubled as a party worker for that election. The teams then carried out a typical election campaign in the experimental villages. In the control villages, parties sent out their regular teams. A typical election campaign in Benin goes as follows: During the three months before the elections, the campaign workers contact voters in their assigned villages. With the help of the local party leader, they rst settle in the village, and then contact the local administration, religious or traditional authorities, and other local political actors. They make home visits to individuals known to be in uential public gures to deliver their campaign messages. These visits last about half an hour. In addition, they meet groups of 10 to 50 voters at sporting and cultural events, and organize public meetings of people, which last approximately two hours. In a redistributive platform experimental village, a typical policy meeting started with the following introduction by the campaign team: We are the representatives of the candidate (say) Saka, who is running for president in the upcoming election. As you know, Saka is running because our region lags behind in nearly all indices of economic development: literacy, infrastructure, health care, etc. If elected, he will help promote the interests of the region, by building new schools, hospitals, roads and more importantly, by hiring more people from the region in the public administration. In contrast, a typical public meeting in a public goods experimental village started with the following introduction: We are the representatives of the candidate (say) Saka, our party stands for (say) democracy and equality. Candidate Saka is running as the opposition/incumbent 5 The experiment would have been more informative if the platforms were focussed on one or two policies, say education, health care and patronnage jobs. This was not possible this time because the platform had to re ect the actual electoral strategies of the candidates. 8

10 candidate. If elected, he will engage in a nation-wide reform of the education and health care system placing an emphasis on building new schools, new hospitals and vaccination campaigns. In conjunction with other opposition leaders, we will ght corruption and promote peace between all ethnic groups and all the regions of the country. After the introductory statement, a discussion period ensued during which detailed explanations were provided on the relevant type of platform. Thus, a redistributive policy message highlighted the candidate s ethnic a liation, singled out the interests of the region, and promised pork barrel projects and patronage jobs. Meanwhile, a public goods message emphasized the candidate s a liation to the incumbent or opposition coalition, and outlined a socioeconomic and political project for the country as a whole. The experiment posed no real risks of Hawthorne or John Henry e ects, because it was fully embedded into the regular political campaigns. 6 Under normal circumstances, voters are subjected to parties platforms, which are usually mixtures of redistributive and public goods messages on public health, education, etc. For the purpose of the experiment, the parties kindly o ered to purify their platforms in the treatment districts so that they would be either purely redistributive or purely public goods oriented. In other words, just like in any regular political campaign, the parties involved in the experiment were running on their own platforms. The only di erence here is that they slightly adapted the campaigns that they intended to run in some villages to t the objectives of the experiment, and because of this it is unlikely that voters were aware of the attention paid to them in the experiment. A potential problem for the internal validity of the experiment is the di usion of nonexperimental messages by radio and television. Indeed during the elections there were 15 radio stations that covered about 80% of the country and two television stations covering about 75% of the country. There are several reasons to think that this is not a serious problem in this case. First, radio and television during elections, especially on national channels, are regulated so that candidates receive equal airtime. Since only four out of the 16 candidates participated 6 Hawthorne e ects occur when experimental subjects change their behavior because they are being observed by the experimenters (Mayo (1933)). John Henry e ects occur when control groups try to "catch up" with treatment groups to compensate their "lack of luck" in the randomization of treatment. (Mayo (1933)) 9

11 in the elections, they would each have gotten only one sixteenth of the airtime available for election campaigns. Second, it is likely that radio and television messages would be of the public goods type, because it is hard to target particular villages using these media. Third, the most dominant forms of political communication in Benin are canvassing, large meetings and rallies. 7 Finally, because radio and TV messages were broadcast in all villages, both control and treatment groups would have been equally a ected by them, reducing the likelihood that they introduced a bias in the estimate of the treatment e ect. The voting and socioeconomic and information network data were gathered during a survey that took place in May 2002, 14 months after the presidential election. 8 The survey took place in the 14 treatment villages and in 7 control villages. One control village was randomly chosen in each district from the pool of control villages. In each village, 35 households were randomly sampled from the 2001 national census, and all household members who voted in 2001 were interviewed. The average response rate of households within villages was 30.9 households or 88.3%, with the number of responses per village varying between 30 and 35. The number of respondents per household varied from 1 to 20, with an average of 3.19 and a standard deviation of Unfortunately, we do not have any measure of within household response rates. The surveyors stayed in each village for an entire week and visited the household several times if some adult members happened to be out at any one visit. However, we do not have a measure of how many adults left the household (as measured by their absence during a whole week), or how many adults passed away between the elections and the time of the survey. This would include respondents who were members of a respondent household, but who refused or were unable to take the survey. Among the 2071 persons who were interviewed, 128 did not answer the central question of the survey, i.e. for whom they voted in the 2001 election. The survey collected basic demographic data (age, gender, marital status, number of people in the households and ethnic a liation), socioeconomic data (educational attainment, economic activities and assets) and data on respondents social networks and use of media outlets (radio, television and newspapers). The information on social networks includes memberships in organizations (cooperatives, NGOs, parties and unions), travel and languages spoken, and 7 See Banegas (1998). 8 A similar survey took place in the same treatment and control villages in April The data generated by this survey were used in Wantchekon (2003). 10

12 participation in political discussions. The survey collected data on voting behavior in the 2001, 1996 and 1991 presidential elections. Respondents were also asked to rank the candidates in the 2001 presidential elections. However, because the survey took place more than one year after the elections, it is likely that respondents preferences would have changed since the election, both due to the announcement of the election results and to respondents perception of the candidates performances after the election. For this reason, we only use respondents reported voting in the analysis. Table 2 presents the summary statistics. The table presents mean values of the variables for the treatment groups and the control group. We test the di erence between each treatment group and the control group using a linear regression with clustered standard errors at the village level, and nd that the treatment groups are similar on nearly all dimensions to the control group. The mean education level is higher in the treatment groups than in the control group, especially in the public goods group. However, the di erence is only signi cant for the public goods group, at the 10 percent level. The summary statistics also indicate that pretreatment voting behavior is quite similar across treatment and control groups. Indeed, in 1996 elections, 65% of voters in clientelist treatment group voted for candidate Kérékou, compared to 62% in the public goods treatment group and 66% in the control group. Estimation method We estimate the e ects of the public goods and clientelistic treatments on voting behavior using the following probit model: P (Y ij = 1jx ij ; T i ) = P (x ij a + T i + x ij T i + u ij > 0) u i id N(0; i ) where Y ij is a categorical variable that takes value 1 if individual j in village i votes for the experimentalist candidate, and 0 otherwise; x ij is the vector of individual characteristics for individual j in village i, and T i is the categorical variable for treatment in village i: The sampling follows a three-stage cluster sampling design: 7 districts were randomly chosen in a 11

13 Table 2: Summary Statistics All Clientel. Public Gds Control Variable Observ. Mean Std. Dev. Mean Mean Mean Voting: Voted for Kerekou...in 1996 second round = in 2001 second round = Demographic variables Age Male= Socio-economic variables Went to school= Education level Ethnic ties with candidate= Stable income=1 Commercial activity= Farms= Nr. of adults per room Owns dwelling= Has electricity= Cement/tile oor= Brick wall= Sources of information Radio= Television= Newspaper/Magazines= Organizational membership Member of any organization= Member of a cooperative= Member of an NGO= Member of a party or union= Traveling Travel frequency Has a child outside= Nr of languages spoken Discussions Discusses politics at home= Discusses politics locally= Discusses politics outside= Notes: The summary statistics are at the individual level. We performed a t-test for the null hypothesis that the mean of the variable for the clientelistic (resp. public goods) group is equal to the mean of the variable in the control group. t-tests include clustering at the village level. Education level takes value 0 for persons without any formal education, 1 for persons who went to primary school, 2 for persons who went to secondary school, and 3 for persons who have higher education. Travel frequency is self-reported frequency of travel outside of the home region, on a scale from 1 to 3, with 1=never or almost never, 2=sometimes, 3=often. 12

14 strati ed way from the sampling frame, the set of stronghold districts of the 4 experimental candidates. Within each district, 2 villages were randomly chosen, and within the villages 35 households were randomly sampled and all adults within the household were interviewed. In the estimation, standard errors are clustered at the village level. Since this allows for any kind of correlation of the observations within the villages, no further clustering is required to account for intra-household correlation. Since not all candidates had the same number of strongholds, and not all strongholds had identical numbers of villages, di erent villages within the sampling frame had di erent probabilities of being sampled to take part in the experiment. The probability of sampling a village v in candidate k s stronghold s is 3N k S k V sk where N k is the number of strongholds controlled by candidate k that participated in the experiment, S k is the number of strongholds controlled by candidate k, and V sk is the number of villages in candidate k s stronghold s. For the sample to be representative, the observations must be weighted to account for di erent sampling weights. However, because we are dealing with a small number of villages, using the sampling weights can substantially lower the precision of our estimates. For this reason, we run both weighted and unweighted regressions, and show that the results are not signi cantly di erent. The dependent variable is a categorical variable that takes value 1 if the respondent voted for the experimentalist candidate, and value zero otherwise. Because in all villages, the experimentalist was also the dominant candidate, we will interchangeably use the terms experimentalist candidate and dominant candidate. Because the dominant candidate commands at least 70 percent of the votes, while the remaining 15 candidates share the rest, the strategic behavior of the other candidates is unlikely to have a substantial e ect on voting outcomes. When estimating the e ect of the public goods treatment, the sample always consists of all respondents in the public goods treatment villages and all respondents in the control villages. The sample used for estimating the e ect of the clientelistic treatment consists of the respondents in the clientelistic treatment villages and in the control villages. Since a substantial number of regressors are categorical variables, we calculate and report the mean marginal e ects of the regressors rather than the marginal e ects at the mean of the independent variables. In the analysis, we investigate the modifying e ect of voter characteristics on their response to the experimental platforms. While Wantchekon (2003) analyzes the modifying e ect 13

15 of gender, ethnic a liation and incumbency of the dominant candidate, we analyze the modifying e ect of voter membership in various social and information networks, education levels, socioeconomic status, marital status and religion. Not surprisingly, the variables that measure social and information networks are substantially correlated. This implies that including all of them in a regression would lead to near-multicollinearity and low estimation precision. For this reason, we use principal components analysis to construct indices for respondent s sources of information, organizational membership, outside contacts and discussions. This gives one variable for use of media outlets, one variable for travel, languages spoken and a long-distance family relations (called outside contacts ), one variable for memberships in local organizations, and one variable for political discussions. Table 3 reports the results of the principal components analysis. In each category, the eigenvalue-eigenvector decomposition suggests that one factor accounts for most of the variation. Two variables - membership in a cooperative and the categorical variable for having a child outside the village- appear to have negative or near-zero factor loadings when included in the principal components analysis, and for this reason we subsequently excluded them from the construction of the composite variables. Our measure of socioeconomic status stems from a principal components analysis of the respondents housing characteristics. We do not use any direct measures of income because more than 60 percent of respondents report being farmers, and only 2.6 percent are formally employed. It is a well known issue that surveys on income in such circumstances do not adequately represent household socioeconomic status, and that consumption surveys are preferable. For a variety of reasons, it was not possible to collect consumption data in the survey. The housing indicator compounds information like the availability of tap water, brick walls (as opposed to mud walls), tile and cement oors (as opposed to mud oors) and electricity in the homestead (Table 3). Finally, the data contains a self-reported assessment of respondents income stability, and whether they are involved in commercial activities, which we use to perform some robustness checks. Results In Table 4, we con rm that the dataset we use mimics the results found in Wantchekon 14

16 Table 3: Principal Components Analysis of Information, Social Network, and Housing Quality Indicators Media Eigenvalue decomposition First factor construction Component Eigenvalue Variable Factor loading Radio= Television= Newspaper/Magazines= Outside contacts Eigenvalue decomposition First factor construction Component Eigenvalue Variable Factor loading Travel frequency Languages spoken Has a child outside= Memberships Eigenvalue decomposition First factor construction Component Eigenvalue Variable Factor loading Member of a party or union= Member of an NGO= Member of a cooperative= Political discussions Eigenvalue decomposition First factor construction Component Eigenvalue Variable Factor loading Discusses politics at home= Discusses politics locally= Discusses politics outside= Housing quality Eigenvalue decomposition First factor construction Component Eigenvalue Variable Factor loading Electricity= Brick wall= Tap water=

17 Table 4: Estimation of the Treatment E ect Public goods experiment Clientelistic experiment (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Treatment= (0.111) (0.113) (0.084) (0.092) (0.078) (0.075) Ethnic ties= (0.055) (0.067) (0.084) (0.056) Male= (0.025) (0.019) (0.015) (0.016) Age (0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001) Education level (0.036) (0.029) (0.025) (0.028) Housing quality pc (0.011) (0.011) (0.007) (0.007) Ethnic ties*treatment (0.079) (0.082) Male*Treatment (0.044) (0.020) Education*Treatment (0.064) (0.027) Observations Pseudo R Candidate xed e ects? No No No No No No Sampling weights? No No No No No No Notes: The estimation method is Probit. The reported estimates are mean marginal e ects. Standard errors are clustered at the village level and are reported in parentheses. 16

18 (2003). In general, the point estimates are consistent with Wantchekon (2003), though estimations using the present dataset are less precise We think this is because (i) we are using a di erent dataset, and (ii) the one-year lag between the election and the survey introduced recall error regarding voting patterns, which decreases the precision of our estimates. The second di erence with Wantchekon (2003) is that estimates of the treatment e ect for the clientelistic experiment are closer to zero in this paper. We think this is because this study excludes villages where the experimental candidate was La a. It turns out that the clientelistic message worked particularly well for this candidate, so that excluding him tends to revert the result to zero. We then proceed to exploring the interaction between treatment and our various measures of social and information networks. Table 5 reports the main results. Columns 1 through 3 report the results from the public goods experiment, while columns 4 through 6 report the results from the clientelistic experiment. The regressions reported in columns 2, 3, 5 and 6 contain candidate xed e ects, and those in columns 3 and 6 also use sample weights. The standard errors are clustered at the village level. By and large, the public goods treatment leads to a signi cant decrease in the probability of voting for the experimentalist, and even more so for men. The e ect of the clientelistic treatment is negative but non-signi cant. (Column 4) The magnitude of the e ect of the public goods treatment is very substantial. We nd that respondents who use media outlets react less negatively to the public goods treatment. The interaction e ect between use of media and treatment is sizeable: a one standard deviation increase in use of media (1.15) is associated with 7.3 to 11.3 percentage points higher responsiveness to public goods treatment. Strikingly, use of media in itself has a strong negative association with the probability of voting for the dominant candidate. While travel and language skills ( outside contacts ) also lessen respondents probability of voting for the dominant candidate, they do not seem to modify the response to the public goods treatment. Memberships in organizations and political discussions have opposite interaction e ects with the public goods treatment. Respondents who are members of parties, unions or NGOs react more positively to the public goods message: a one standard deviation increase in memberships (1.14) is associated with 6.5 to 9.5 percentage points higher responsiveness to public goods treatment. By contrast, a one standard deviation increase in the discussions measure (1.17) is associated with 7.6 to 10.7 percentage points lower responsiveness to this treatment. 17

19 Table 5: Estimation of the Treatment E ect: Interaction with Information and Social Network Measures Public goods experiment Clientelistic experiment (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Treatment= (0.092) (0.080) (0.095) (0.069) (0.061) (0.070) Ethnic ties= (0.058) (0.048) (0.045) (0.046) (0.044) (0.037) Ethnic ties*treatment (0.060) (0.057) (0.058) (0.063) (0.049) (0.039) Male= (0.019) (0.019) (0.019) (0.015) (0.015) (0.016) Male*Treatment (0.031) (0.026) (0.026) (0.036) (0.034) (0.035) Age (0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001) Education level (0.019) (0.021) (0.022) (0.019) (0.022) (0.025) Education*Treatment (0.033) (0.025) (0.025) (0.017) (0.020) (0.027) Media PC *Treatment (0.019) (0.015) (0.014) (0.016) (0.016) (0.015) Media PC *Treatment (0.030) (0.017) (0.019) (0.021) (0.017) (0.020) Outside contacts PC (0.019) (0.018) (0.016) (0.014) (0.016) (0.016) Outs. contacts PC *Treatment (0.024) (0.024) (0.019) (0.019) (0.021) (0.026) Memberships PC *Treatm (0.014) (0.010) (0.010) (0.010) (0.011) (0.010) Memberships PC *Treatm (0.021) (0.017) (0.019) (0.019) (0.016) (0.017) Pol. Discussion PC (0.021) (0.014) (0.013) (0.016) (0.016) (0.015) Pol. Discuss PC *Treatment (0.041) (0.020) (0.018) (0.021) (0.019) (0.015) Housing quality PC (0.012) (0.012) (0.012) (0.007) (0.007) (0.007) Observations Pseudo R Candidate xed e ects? No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Sampling weights? No No Yes No No Yes Notes: The estimation method is Probit. The reported estimates are mean marginal e ects. Standard errors are clustered at the village level and are reported in parentheses. PC stands for principal components. Variables with the "PC" su x were estimated using principal components analysis (cf. table supra). 18

20 Interestingly, the e ects of political discussions show that increased participation in political discussions is associated with a higher probability to vote for the dominant candidate. One may wonder whether use of media, outside contacts, membership in organizations and political discussions are just artifacts of the education level and economic status of a voter. In order words, the more educated a voter is, the more likely she is to be broadly connected, or vice versa. For this reason, we control for voters level of education and interact their education level with the treatment variable, and we also control for voters housing quality. We nd that education has a substantial level e ect: for example, a shift from no education to primary education decreases the probability of voting for the dominant candidate between 8.0 and 10.0 percentage points. As for the interaction e ect with treatment, we nd that voters with primary education are 5.7 to 7.8 percentage points more likely to vote for the experimentalist candidate in the public goods experiment than voters with no education. There is no such interaction e ect in the clientelistic experiment. We do not nd any correlation between the housing quality indicator and voting behavior. This suggests that either di erences in social status were not large enough within the sample to generate di erences in political behavior, or that the housing quality indicator is not a satisfactory proxy for socioeconomic status, or that there is no political di erentiation along social status. We think that the rst explanation - low levels of inequality in the areas where the experiment took place - is relevant. Benin has one of the lowest inequality levels in Africa, and rural inequality is signi cantly lower than urban inequality. The 2001 Gini coe cient for per capita consumption in rural areas is 0.30, about the level of Nordic countries. As a robustness check to the nding that socioeconomic status does not matter in our sample, we add regressors that indicate whether respondents report having a stable income or a commercial activity, and interact those indicators with treatment. (Results not reported) We nd little evidence that those variables matter, and adding them does not a ect the point estimates of the coe cients on the other variables. A question that arises from the basic analysis is why men and women react so di erently to public goods platforms. We clarify the issue by looking into the characteristics of both subsamples. First, only 11.2 percent of women in our sample are unmarried, while 30.7 percent of men are. Close to 50 percent of unmarried women are age 20 or younger, while 70 percent 19

21 are younger than 25. Since so few women in the sample are unmarried and most of those are clustered in the age group 18 to 20, sample sizes would be inadequate to analyze women s voting behavior by marital status. We select the sample of men age 18 to 40 and analyze their voting reaction to the public goods platforms by marital status. Approximately 46 percent of men in this sample are single. While single men are less likely to vote for the dominant candidate than married men, the two groups are similar reactions to the public goods treatment. Religious a liation is a competing explanation for our nding on the role of ethnic ties on voters response to the public goods treatment. The three main religious groups in Benin, Christians, Muslims and Animists, are almost equally represented in the sample, while three out of four candidates in the sample are Christians. When controlling for respondents religious a liation, we nd no change in the coe cient estimate of the interaction between ethnic ties and treatment or in its statistical signi cance. This indicates that ethnic a liation is far more politically salient than religious a liation. In addition, there is no signi cant change in the other coe cient estimates. This is an important robustness check because the summary statistics suggest that Muslims are less likely to participate in political discussions or local associations. The stability of the coe cients on memberships and their interactions with the treatment con rms that the results are not merely picking up di erences in religious a liation. Finally, we con rm the modifying e ects of ethnic a liation that are reported in Wantchekon (2003). The conventional wisdom in political science is that ethnic ties are strong predictors of voting behavior. In this paper, we construct an indicator of whether the experimentalist candidate and the voter are from the same ethnic group 9, and use this indicator as an exogenous variable in the regressions. As reported in Table 5, Columns 1 and 3, respondents with ethnic ties to the candidate react percentage points more positively to the public goods message. Once again, there is no corresponding nding in the clientelistic experiment. The level e ect of ethnic ties on voting behavior is not signi cantly di erent from zero. That is, voters from the same ethnic group as the dominant candidate are not any more or less likely to vote for that candidate than those who are not. This means that ethnic ties matter for voting behavior only when the message is of a universalistic or public goods-type. 9 We consider six ethnic groups: Adja, Fon, Bariba, Dendi, Yoruba, and minorities from the North East which include the Otamari. Amoussou is Adja, Soglo is Fon, La a is Bariba, and Kérékou is Otamari. Since the Bariba and the Otamari are ethnically linked, Bariba voters are considered to have ethnic ties with Kérékou. 20